A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Sally Charin hopes someone can identify a poem beginning: “admit impediments, accept alarms, and random incompatibilities….” She recalls the author’s being identified as a Radcliffe graduate of the 1930s.

More queries from the archives:
“The saved man goes to the zoo with his child on a Sunday afternoon.”
“He that keepeth the law becometh master of the intent thereof.”
“Oh, do not think because I make  / Arrogant wounded unkind stabs / At suffering prowling man /  That I’m not partisan to all the fumbles in his mind. Whence else these lines? For whose sake?”

 “I’ll pretend I’m teaching” (July-August). No citations have arrived, but Eve Menger and Carlota Dwyer noted the quotation’s similarity to a remark often attributed to Soviet workers: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138 or via e-mail to chapterandverse@harvardmag.com.

You might also like

Author and Harvard Divinity School writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams finds beauty in the world around us.

Shakespeare and Stephen King Have a Lot in Common

Shakespeare scholar Caroline Bicks studies horror and fear in literature. 

Radcliffe Institute Announces 2026-2027 Fellows

Scholars will tap Harvard’s intellectual resources during the coming academic year.

Most popular

The former economics concentrator brings his talent for crunching numbers to netminding.

Pritzker Hall, designed for collaboration, should be complete in 2027.

An animal’s journey from grief to love shows how much humans need each other, too.

Explore More From Current Issue

Five individuals are posed in a monochrome outdoor setting near a cinderblock building, some standing, some seated.

Photographer and writer Morgan Smith chronicles life beyond the violence in Ciudad Juárez and other Mexican towns.

A chaotic scene in a messy room with people engaging in various activities, some cleaning.

Until the 1950s, professionals cleaned up after students in the dorms.

Label showing the anatomy of a worker bee, featuring a detailed illustration.

Science and art capture the microscopic natural world.